CHAPTER XLI
ROGER BACON
Of all mediaeval men, Thomas Aquinas achieved the most organic and comprehensive union of the results of human reasoning and the data of Christian theology. He may be regarded as the final exponent of scholasticism, perfected in method, universal in scope, and still integral in purpose. The scholastic method was soon to be impugned and the scholastic universality broken. The premature attack upon the method came from Roger Bacon;[615] the fatal breach in the scholastic wholeness resulted from the constructive, as well as critical, achievements of Duns Scotus and Occam.
Bacon is a perplexing personality. With other mediaeval thinkers one quickly feels the point of view from which to regard them. Not so with this most disparate genius of the Middle Ages. Reading his rugged statements, and trying to form a coherent thought of him, we are puzzled at the contradictions of his mind. One may not say that he was not of his time. Every man is of his time, and cannot raise himself very far out of the mass of knowledge and opinion furnished by it, any more than a swimmer can lift himself out of the water that sustains him. Yet personal temper and inclination may aline a man with less potent tendencies, which are obscured and hampered by the dominant intellectual interests of the period. Assuredly, through all the Middle Ages, there were men who noticed such physical phenomena as bore upon their lives, even men who cared for the dumb beginnings of what eventually might lead to natural science. But they were not representative of their epoch’s master energies; and in the Middle Ages, as always, the man of evident and great achievement will be one who, like Aquinas, stands upon the whole attainment of his age. Roger Bacon, on the contrary, was as one about whose loins the currents of his time drag and pull; they did not aid him, and yet he could not extricate himself. It was his intellectual misfortune that he was held by his time so fatally, so fatally, at least, for the proper doing of the work which was to be his contribution to human enlightenment, a contribution well ignored while he lived, and for long afterward.
Bacon accepted the dominant mediaeval convictions: the entire truth of Scripture; the absolute validity of the revealed religion, with its dogmatic formulation; also (to his detriment) the universally prevailing view that the end of all the sciences is to serve their queen, theology. Yet he hated the ways of mediaeval natural selection and survival of the mediaeval fittest, and the methods by which Albert or Thomas or Vincent of Beauvais were at last presenting the sum of mediaeval knowledge and conviction. Well might he detest those ways and methods, seeing that he was Roger Bacon, one impelled by his genius to critical study, to observation and experiment. He was impassioned for linguistics, for mathematics, for astronomy, optics, chemistry, and for an experimental science which should confirm the contents of all these, and also enlarge the scope of human ingenuity. Yet he was held fast, and his thinking was confused, by what he took from his time. Especially he was obsessed by the idea that philosophy, including every branch of knowledge, must serve theology, and even in that service find its justification. But what has chemistry to do with theology? What has mathematics? And what has the physical experimental method? By maintaining the utility of these for theology, Bacon saved his mediaeval orthodoxy, and it may be, his skin from the fire. But it wrecked the working of his genius. His writings remain, such of them as are known, astounding in their originality and insight, and almost as remarkable for their inconsistencies; they are marked by a confusion of method and a distortion of purpose, which sprang from the contradictions between Bacon’s genius and the current views which he adopted.
The career of Bacon was an intellectual tragedy, conforming to the old principles of tragic art: that the hero’s character shall be large and noble, but not flawless, inasmuch as the fatal consummation must issue from character, and not happen through chance. He died an old man, as in his youth, so in his age, a devotee of tangible knowledge. His pursuit of a knowledge which was not altogether learning had been obstructed by the Order of which he was an unhappy and rebellious member; quite as fatally his achievement was deformed from within by the principles which he accepted from his time. But he was responsible for his acceptance of current opinions; and as his views roused the distrust of his brother Friars, his intractable temper drew their hostility (of which we know very little) on his head. Persuasiveness and tact were needed by one who would impress such novel views as his upon his fellows, or, in the thirteenth century, escape persecution for their divulgence. Bacon attacked dead and living worthies, tactlessly, fatuously, and unfairly. Of his life scarcely anything is known, save from his allusions to himself and others; and these are insufficient for the construction of even a slight consecutive narrative. Born; studied at Oxford; went to Paris, studied, experimented; is at Oxford again, and a Franciscan; studies, teaches, becomes suspect to his Order, is sent back to Paris, kept under surveillance, receives a letter from the pope, writes, writes, writes,—his three best-known works; is again in trouble, confined for many years, released, and dead, so very dead, body and fame alike, until partly unearthed after five centuries.
Inference and construction may fill out this sombre outline. England was the land of Bacon’s birth, and Ilchester is said to have been the natal spot. The approximate date may be guessed at from his reference to himself as senex in 1267, and his remark that he had then been studying forty years. His family seems to have been wealthy. Besides the letter of Pope Clement, hereafter to be quoted, there is one contemporary reference to him. Mathew Paris has a story of a certain clericus de curia, scilicet Rogerus Bacum, speaking up with bold wit to King Henry III. at Oxford in 1233. Bacon when a young man studied there under Robert Grosseteste and Adam of Marsh. He frequently refers to both, and always with respect. His chief enthusiasm is for the former. For years this admirable man was chancellor of Oxford; until made bishop of Lincoln in 1235. Although never a Franciscan, he was the Order’s devoted friend, and lectured in its house at Oxford. Grosseteste founded the study of Greek at Oxford, and collected treatises upon Greek grammar. Bacon, following him, wrote a Greek grammar. Grosseteste, before Bacon, devoted himself to physics and mathematics, and all that these many-branched sciences might include. Besides a taste for these studies Bacon may have had from him the idea that they were useful for theology. “No one,” says Bacon, “knew the sciences save Lord Robert, Bishop of Lincoln, from his length of life and experience, and studiousness and industry, and because he knew mathematics and optics, and was able to know all things; and he knew enough of the languages to understand the saints and philosophers of antiquity; but not enough to translate them, unless towards the end of his life when he invited Greeks, and had books of Greek grammar gathered from Greece and elsewhere.”[616] There is evidence that others at Oxford, besides Grosseteste, were interested in the study of Greek and natural science.
From Oxford Bacon went to Paris, where apparently he remained for a number of years; he was made a doctor there, and afterwards became a Franciscan. Since a monk could own nothing, one may perhaps infer that Bacon did not join the Order until after the lapse of certain twenty years of scientific research, in which he spent much money, as he says in 1267, in an often-quoted passage of the Opus tertium: